Organizations use computer systems to carry out a variety of business tasks, for example accounting, on-line processing and financial forecasting etc. Each type of organization is required to meet certain regulatory requirements with regards to the data that is gathered. For example, in the financial sector, the US Securities and Exchange Commission has imposed stringent record retention requirements on financial brokers involving secure long term archival and retrieval of customer correspondence, including audit trails for both retrieval and disposition.
Regulatory compliance not only requires the retention of data for extended periods of time, but also to demonstrate the computer systems' configuration and the process by which data was gathered in the event of a legal dispute surrounding the content of a particular element of data. An example of this can be found in the Insurance Industry. When a customer purchases an insurance policy over a computer network such as the Internet, the customer is required to surrender certain information pertaining to himself or herself, for example, details about the asset to be insured and the type or insurance coverage the customer wishes to purchase. If at some time in the future a legal dispute arises over the insurance policy, for example, that incorrect details were given, this may affect the type of coverage that a customer was given under his or her insurance policy. As a result, the insurance company may be obligated to reconstruct the configuration of the computer system at the exact time of processing the customer's insurance policy, to determine what output parameters would be generated based on the corrected input parameters.
Therefore, an object of the present invention is to determine the configuration of a data processing system at the time a transaction is processed.